Faust had it easy. Remember Faust? Wanted to know everything, so he made a pact with the Devil: Dear Devil, Near the end of his life, the Devil believed he had lived up to his end of the deal. He'd given Faust a goodly helping of sex (Helen of Troy. etc.), some nice immersions in the past and the future, extensive wanderings through worlds seen and unseen (this part, like all metaphysics, turned out to be more boring that enlightening). The thing was, it still wasn't enough. Even near death, Faust wanted more, more, more. That Faust. Never satisfied. We, in our modern age, of course can now see that the Devil cheated, bigtime. That he did NOT show Faust everything. Not even barely. Where, for example, in the many tellings and re-tellings of the story, do you see Faust encountering Windows? Nowhere. Where do you see Faust lusting after and acquiring either a BMW 7-series or a Chevrolet Suburban? Nowhere. Where do you see Faust, pockets bulging with PDA's, finally feeling fully in touch with the world? Nowhere. Where do you see Faust popping anti-oxidants and Viagra, confident that he will never have to honor his end of the contract because HE'S GOING TO FUCKING LIVE FOREVER? Nowhere. Basically, what's missing from ALL the Faust stories is THE 21st CENTURY (in other words, us!). It's already clear that, however talented Marlowe, Goethe, et al. were, they did not foresee the coming Age of Toys. Their Faust could be seduced in many ways, by girls, by boys, by the wonders of time-travel, by hanging out with low- to mid-level gods, and so on. But nowhere in the multi-faceted vision of these old visionaries do you find one K-Mart. K-Mart, you say? Yes, K-Mart. Because even your bottom-end purveyors of toys now have electronics departments filled with cheap, CHEAP goodies, the mastery of whose 10,000 features can easily fill one life-time to overflowing. Image if the Devil had ever led Faust into a K-Mart. He would've been in 7th Heaven, so to speak. And that's just K-Mart. God (so to speak) help him if he had wandered into J&R Electronics & Computers, or (worst of all) stumbled across a Sharper Image catalog. Re Faust's traditional temptations: we've now got sex on demand, while Hollywood keeps trying hard to make both past and future entertaining (when it's clear they were just as inane as the present), and as for gods, well, we've pretty well consigned them to theo-prisons where various Religionists of a primitivist bent genuflect to them weekly. The toys, however, are very, very much with us. Lots of good people now spend a lot of time worrying about global warming (and of course lots of good people don't, but that's another story). Daily, stories enter our field of attention about the coming inundation of global coastal areas as the sea level rises. Tragedy enough, for sure. But the greater inundation, and greater tragedy, may already be upon us. Gadgets galore! Toys without end, amen, amen. My watch talks to the world (and vice-versa), if I don't mind spending two months mastering its teensy interface. My car knows where I am better than I do and can tell me where I should go in no uncertain terms (accurate to 1/10 of a meter) if I can find a spare two weeks to master the combined GPS- DVD- CD- SatelliteRadio interface. My computer now never sleeps, spending MY sleeping hours scouring the universe for signs of extra-terrestrial life, that is, if I'll just take the time to install and master the necessary software. Seduction on a scale neither Faust nor his writers ever dreamed of. Casanova became the symbol of the person who gives himself up completely to sex. Faust became the symbol of the person who gives himself up to knowledge. Expect this century to give us a figure, call him for now Toy Boy, who gives himself up to gadgets. Neo-luddites we already have with us (think Ted Kazynski; think Arab terrorists and the World Trade Center). In their violent, poorly thought out way, they are onto something. Toys are NOT us. But how long will it take us to find out, and at what price? Alas, alas, I'm afraid the inundation has hardly started. END
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